Maine’s Great Fires Kindle a Second Chance at Love

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CreditCreditAndrew Bannecker

By Mary Pols

May 3, 2017

THE STARS ARE FIRE By Anita Shreve241 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

In October 1947 more than 200,000 acres of Maine burned, including half of Acadia National Park. Nine towns were destroyed. The disaster was a myth in the making, a series of events sufficiently violent to feed anyone’s dark imagination, where it could emerge as one giant, terrifying fireball, with Maine as the unfortunate target. In truth, though, these were fires plural, 200 of them, erupting almost as if timed but fed by what can only be considered bad timing: drought, unusually high winds, random carelessness. Maine was a birthday cake, lit everywhere. Forest fires became town fires, even coastal fires, with some people forced to the ocean’s edge. In Bar Harbor, they were evacuated by fishing boats. The historical record of their travails is a literary opportunist’s delight; it’s surprising it took a novelist this long to pounce.

Anita Shreve’s “The Stars Are Fire” is the swiftly paced if occasionally soppy saga of a young mother, Grace Holland, who loses her home and nearly her life that October. The so-called Great Fires are a good fit for Shreve, who has repurposed Maine history before to best-selling effect in “The Weight of Water,” where she gave a fictional spin (and twist) to an 1873 double homicide on Smuttynose Island. (Kathryn Bigelow directed an adaptation, a mystifying stinker of a film.)

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When “The Stars Are Fire” begins in a rainy spring, Grace is only 23 and already has two children with her husband, Gene, a surveyor working on the new Maine Turnpike. They live in a place Shreve calls Hunts Beach, which from all the geographic clues sounds very close to Fortune’s Rocks, the setting for four of her previous novels. The emotional territory is familiar as well. Grace doesn’t have an ideal marriage. As she reminds herself, Gene is handsome, a good provider and “enthralled” with their son and daughter. But he’s either a clumsy, rough lover or, as his wife suspects, “deeply troubled.” Neither Grace nor Shreve seems to have decided which that might be; he’s a boogeyman trotted out for convenience.

Shreve wastes little time getting to the fire itself, which arrives as a reddish glow on the western horizon before the end of the book’s first quarter. It’s a dynamic, vivid scene. While Grace rushes to the beach to take cover with her best friend and their children, Gene is last seen walking into a wall of flames. The question of his fate remains open for much of the book, which says little for his wife’s desire to find him, or the investigative talents of the fictional Maine police force.

Grace is rendered homeless, as were 2,500 Mainers after that October, but arguably she gains from the fire as well — the freedom to pursue a career and new romantic prospects. This is how Shreve, reliably a romantically inclined writer, rolls. A heel of a man is barely out of the picture when a better man shows up, first to help and then to woo. In “The Pilot’s Wife,” a woman learns of her treacherous husband’s death from the man who becomes her next lover. In “The Stars Are Fire,” Grace is rescued, post-fire, by a highly eligible doctor. Then she encounters a soulful pianist, a man she finds squatting at her recently deceased mother-in-law’s still-standing, palatial shorefront house. Hearing him play for the first time, Grace muses, “Is it from musical notes that true longing is born?” How much you enjoy this book may depend on whether you can answer that question in the affirmative. If life were anything like a Shreve novel, Match.com would be a website selling the wooden sticks to light fires with.

But how the pages turn, even the ones padded with Grace’s not entirely believable ambivalence over matters large and small. She’s an enterprising woman, sensible, a true Yankee. (Of her laundry, she observes, “A soft towel is a coddle, doesn’t get the dead skin off.”) Would she really be reluctant, in this crisis, to help herself to her deceased mother-in-law’s possessions? Gene is (or was) the woman’s only son! Every reluctant dip into the dead lady’s closet feels like an achievement in independence. Shreve has a gift for making the mundane engaging; Grace’s excursion to Biddeford to look for a used car is nearly as interesting as her romantic life. Long before Liane Moriarty was spinning her “Big Little Lies,” Shreve was spicing up domestic doings in beachfront settings with terrible husbands and third-act twists. She still is, as effectively as ever, this time with a narrative literally lit from within.

Mary Pols, a reporter for The Portland Press Herald in Maine, is the author of a memoir, “Accidentally on Purpose.”